Some time ago Dutch academics lost their civil servant status. But in its place the language of ‘tenure-track’ and ‘tenure’ has entered Dutch academic life increasingly with American job titles, although the route to a permanent contract with tenure is quite diverse. ‘Academic freedom’ is officially recognized by article 1.6 of a regular law “Wet op het hoger onderwijs en wetenschappelijk onderzoek.” In principle, academic freedom should protect an academic (among other things) when she conducts unpopular research or makes statements based on her expertise that may be displeasing to university administrators, the public, and politicians.
In the Netherlands academic freedom is legally seen as an extension of freedom of expression and is also constrained by some of the constitutional limitations on freedom of expression (especially the prohibition on discrimination). But because Dutch academic freedom falls under the freedom of expression, Dutch academic freedom also is highly constrained by all the limitations that Dutch employment law puts on freedom of speech in the workplace. In practice, a ‘tenured’ academic is no different than other Dutch employees with a permanent contract. {UPDATE: SEE BELOW FOR An IMPORTANT QUALIFICATION}
The full significance of this limitation on the attenuated nature of academic freedom has only become apparent this past week when a judge allowed the University of Groningen to fire Dr. Susanne Täuber, who was an associate professor in the department of Human resource Management and Organizational Behavior, because of a [and now I quote the judge’s verdict] “disrupted employment relationship.” (In the Netherlands, it’s not very easy to fire a permanent employee, and for those with a permanent contract a judge generally gets involved unless the employee and employer can agree to terms.) Unfortunately, the reason why the ’employment relationship’ was permanently disrupted exposes the hollowness of Dutch academic freedom.
Dr. Täuber was recruited as a (highly prestigious) Rosalind Franklin Fellow to the University of Groningen. She was awarded a very competitive VENI grant by NWO (the Dutch Science Foundation). She is a member of the national advisory committee diversity and inclusion in higher education and research (by appointment of the Secretary of education, culture, and sciences). In 2017 the University of Groningen appointed her a member of the Young Academy Groningen. I mention all of this because by the University of Groningen’s own lights she was one of their star academics.
The disturbed employment relationship between the University of Groningen and Dr. Täuber did not arise from her publication (here) in the Journal of Management Studies, but the court’s account of the facts of the case shows that the department itself sees this publication as the cause of a “breach of trust”! The judge is explicit in the verdict that the reactions of her colleagues to the article “played an important, if not a decisive role in the development of the seriously disrupted employment relationship.” The publication is in Dr. Täuber’s area of expertise and was taken so seriously that the dean of the faculty stated “that it [!] has damaged the working relationship.” The dean also wrote to the journal to complain about the lack of objectivity in the article!
Strikingly, while the court is, thus, very explicit that Dr. Täuber’s essay played a key causal role in the destruction of workplace relationship and finds fault with her colleagues, neither freedom of expression nor academic freedom plays any role in the verdict. (It could eventually play a role in severance pay, but that obviously does not provide sufficient protection for academic freedom, especially because in the Netherlands such pay is capped.) That academic freedom is protected is explicitly no part of the judge’s consideration at all.
Now her publication is a kind of autoethnography and recounts Dr. Täuber’s experiences with workplace discrimination, Dutch academic mores, and the limitations of a badly implemented diversity/affirmative action recruitment program. None of the colleagues are named, and while it’s pretty clear she is describing her (awful) experiences in the department no individual colleague can be identified plausibly. The piece explicitly intends to show “that initiatives deliberately set up to promote gender equality might inadvertently work against women.”
Now, I am sure that it is highly unpleasant to learn that the purported dysfunctionality (and worse) of your department shows up in a publication. (I am myself actually curious if a research ethics committee would give permission for this.) But if you take academic freedom seriously as an academic, you should not use substantive differences of opinion about academic functioning — in a department that researches/teaches human resources, of all places! — to settle labor disputes or use them to escalate these.
It’s really embarrassing that Dr. Täuber’s colleagues and the dean’s office failed to treat her article as an opportunity to start a conversation about the department culture (something some of her colleagues thought necessary, too). The piece surely would not have been the last word on the topic. Unfortunately, criticizing any of Dr. Täuber’s arguments now also feels like approving of the University of Groningen’s academic misconduct. And I definitely don’t want to participate in that.
That is, you don’t have to agree with any of Dr. Täuber’s particular arguments to recognize that Dutch academics are now in a very dangerous situation where genuine academic freedom is only available if you are already approaching retirement. (As I implied above it usually takes a while to fire somebody in the Netherlands.) Dutch universities have been given a template of how to get rid of academics they find a nuisance or where it is politically expedient to do so: make the workplace hellish for the employee, insist that the employee undergo coaching and mediation, insist there is no improvement in their ‘soft skills,’ and fail to offer them suitable alternative employment. The universities don’t even have to disguise their bad faith, and can intimidate any recalcitrant employee and push them out of the academy.
You can sign a petition in support of Dr. Täuber here:
UPDATE: After a Dutch translation of this post appeared (here), Prof. Geert Buelens called my attention to a relatively recent (October 2022) ruling of the Hoge Raad (the Supreme Court of the Netherland) in a very similar case (here). This involved an instructor at a ROC (a regional vocational school–not unlike certain community colleges Stateside). This instructor wrote a rather critical book about her experiences with education reform at the ROC, which upset her direct colleagues and led to her being fired because of a ‘disrupted workplace relationship.’ The judge and circuit judge agreed, but their verdicts were overturned by the Hoge Raad. It appealed to the European Court of Human Rights’ views on freedom of speech that state that employment sanctions that are in response to speech infringe the right to freedom of speech. The Hoge Raad made clear that if the publication is the source of the disrupted relationship it is protected speech. An important feature of the decision of the Hoge Raad is that it explicitly followed the advise of the advocate general, which tends to represent the consensus of elite legal opinion. There are clear analogies with Dr. Täuber’s case.
{ 32 comments }
Martin Holterman 03.12.23 at 2:35 pm
Quick correction: What you’re citing there is the draft EU Constitution from 2005. The Dutch constitution does not mention academic freedom as such. Art. 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights does, but that does not technically apply to a strictly domestic situation, while freedom of speech in general is protected (in a way that is legally relevant to this case) in art. 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and art. 7 of the Dutch constitution.
Incidentally, I think the most important thing not to forget here is that in the Netherlands academics and others alike can also rely on a large body of employment law that protects against unfair dismissal. There are many precedents of people who were dismissed for what they had published, only to have their dismissal overturned in court. That is not an issue that is specific to academia.
But yes, my alma mater clearly messed up here.
Eric Schliesser 03.12.23 at 2:58 pm
Hi Martin,
Thank you for catching that. I corrected the post and refer to Dutch law now.
As I note Dutch employment law offers pretty decent protection for those with a permanent contract. But academic freedom has not offered much further protection in other recent dismissals of academics. (In most cases the situation is also not so clear-cut.) In fact, in instances where one shows unwillingness to teach the curriculum academic freedom will be used against the recalcitrant employee. (I don’t think that’s always problematic.)
Ingrid Robeyns 03.12.23 at 3:14 pm
Eric @2 – can you please explain a bit more what you mean with “In fact, in instances where one shows unwillingness to teach the curriculum academic freedom will be used against the recalcitrant employee.” Do you mean that when people teach [what 99% of academics consider] conspiracy theories etc. that ‘academic freedom’ will then be used against them, threaten them with dismissal?
You also add: “I don’t think that’s always problematic”. I agree. But what if others do not agree? Do we have any set of rules or guidlines that tells us where the boundaries lie? To the best of my knowledge, we don’t. And that does show something what I would think it very worrysome, namely, that we have no clear view on what academic freedom in the Netherlands exactly means and entails, and what its consequences are for our teaching and research and public outreach, and in what circumstances it can legitimately be provoked to demand changes from an faculty member, or even dismiss them.
Enzo Rossi 03.12.23 at 4:17 pm
Spot on, Eric. Just one thing: I agree that this might’ve struggled with ethics approval, had it been an autoethnography. But there’s no need to see it like that. I think it’s more of a social theory sketch. And so, no human participants, and no ethics review needed. She’s in the clear there. I hope the Hoge Raad will see this for the blatant violation of academic freedom that it is. And meanwhile we should try to fix this in the Collective Agreement of Dutch Universities. The unions need to step up their game, by a lot.
engels 03.12.23 at 7:12 pm
the language of ‘tenure-track’ and ‘tenure’ has entered Dutch academic life increasingly with American job titles
As non-academic I would love to know why this happened seemingly everywhere.
Also am I right in seeing a striking correspondence between the new ranks (assistant, associate, prof) and those of American law firms?
Ray Vinmad 03.12.23 at 7:20 pm
I didn’t read everything carefully but this article is interesting. An outsider looks critically at things everyone else takes for granted then makes some suggestions for change.
It’s the kind of thing which seems would only mildly irk most people in the US context unless they were EXTREMELY touchy. And if you think it’s unfair, why not argue the author misunderstands the complexities of some contexts? It doesn’t seem damaging or libelous.
Isn’t this what academic freedom is designed for–to say hard things people with power over you might not agree with about subjects you have a substantive claim to know something about; to start conversations about issues of significance without fear of reprisal? Some people use academic freedom to needle vulnerable minorities, and/or troll people with demonstrably less social clout or worse. I agree we can’t distinguish between these cases and efforts in good faith because there’s no arbiter for that. And creating one would be destructive of academic freedom. So we have to let bad faith efforts pass. But this doesn’t seem like one. It seems a good faith effort, perhaps from a narrow perspective. However, the author isn’t hiding this.
I am genuinely surprised this is enough to get someone fired. This cannot be great for the goals the author is scrutinizing. At least one problem with achieving those goals is usually that there are different social locations and values outsiders start from and they then have to navigate those social contexts alone, always accommodating their views to many insiders. Saying ‘shut up, now you are fired’ when you describe an outsider perspective is a sign that they are truly unwilling to make any accommodations from the inside, the very thing that poses a hurdle for anyone equity goals are supposed to benefit.
Alex SL 03.12.23 at 10:37 pm
I have always taken academic freedom to mean that it shouldn’t be possible to fire an academic for what venues of research they pursue or for their expressed opinions. It certainly does not protect “unwillingness to teach the curriculum”; teaching as a professor is simply doing one’s job, and one cannot expect to draw a salary if one is unwilling to do the job that earns the salary, end. of.
This case here is a tricky one. Yes, it is in one sense a question of freedom of expression or speech, but it isn’t something like I don’t believe in gods or I think the Dutch monarchy should be abolished, it is instead direct personal criticism. I find it difficult to imagine how one could continue working amicably with one’s colleagues and managers after such a publication. Even if no names were named, individual people likely know they are being written about. Expecting everybody to say, oh dear, I did not know it was like that, thanks, we will become better people now, is ethically understandable but, sadly, not realistic about human nature. So, best case scenario would have been that academic freedom saves her job, but she is a pariah for the rest of her career at that place.
Matt 03.13.23 at 12:49 am
Also am I right in seeing a striking correspondence between the new ranks (assistant, associate, prof) and those of American law firms?
I don’t think there’s any correspondence here at all – not in the names, in the relationship, or historical. (Typically, young lawyers in big firms are “associates” when they start, and then hope to become “partners”. There’s some variation among “partners”, but it doesn’t correspond in any way to the above, either in name or function.) So, I think there’s nothing here.
On the substance, I think there would be a lot of similarities w/ Australia here. One thing I’ve been told over and over is that direct criticism of the university one works at is a pretty good way to get fired, and while this might be seen as an unfair dismissal by a tribunal, if the “employment relationship” is seen as damaged, reinstatement is very unlikely. This seems bad to me. Alex SL notes that, if you criticize your colleagues in public, it’s likely that they won’t like this and that it will make work relationships tense. That’s so, and no doubt Täuber wasn’t so naive as to not expect this. But academica is an area where you can normally keep doing normal work even if your colleagues don’t like you (it’s not that rare!) so on its own, it seems like a weak reason for firing someone.
Alan White 03.13.23 at 5:38 am
Academic freedom in the US has decidedly changed over the course of my (now retired) academic career. In my teaching I actually mentioned–not used–racial epithets to characterize events or relate evidence to my classes about such matters in the past. If I were teaching now, I could not do that, but only use some evasion to vaguely indicate what I was talking about. The legal erosion of the use-mention distinction in determining what is contentious content is just one aspect of how academic freedom has been eroded, and mostly from the political promotion of the primacy of emotional reactions over rational content. This OP is another case of that, I should think.
engels 03.13.23 at 7:06 am
Sorry: perhaps the correspondence is with British law firms then because iirc they are “assistant solicitors”, then “associate solicitors”, then partners (I appreciate the idea they became the model for universities around the world is a little unlikely…)
Ingrid Robeyns 03.13.23 at 11:21 am
So I have a question to all of you. The legal ground for dismissal in this case is “disrupted employment relationship” – basically a deep conflict between the person being fired and their employment/unit of employement.
Does tenure in the UK, US etc. protect Faculty from dismissal on such grounds? Or is this a ground for dismissal that is a means available to all universities worldwide? I ask this as a factual question, without an implicit suggestion about what my view is of such legal means; I am just interested to find out to what extent this is universal or not.
Sashas 03.13.23 at 1:33 pm
@Ingrid Robeyns (11) I had never heard of the term “disrupted employment relationship” until this thread. I’m in the US, and I’m active in union circles so I think if that was a thing here I would have heard about it.
@Alan White (9) Given you’re retired and I’m not, I’m going to go ahead and just say you’re wrong about this. The use/mention distinction is alive and well. We’re just now expected to actually put in the work ahead of time to make clear which side of that line we’re on. I blessedly haven’t had to deal with this too much myself, but I’ve got plenty of horror stories from colleagues of old professors who dropped slurs in passing in class and only afterward insisted that they were mentioning the slur, not using it.
@Alex SL (7) Academic freedom as I understand it (again, in the US) usually also covers content reasonably included in the curriculum. This is significant because we are generally given fairly wide latitude about what content we cover in our courses, and reasonable inclusions within a course definitely overlap with things that certain state legislatures would like to make it illegal to say. Example: Florida can move to dissolve the African American Studies department at the University of Florida, but they can’t individually fire professors in that department for assigning a reading by Malcolm X. (Florida might be a bad example, since I’m not actually sure whether they still have tenure, but hopefully the idea is clear.)
Cora Diamond 03.13.23 at 5:23 pm
If “tenure in the UK, US, etc “ is meant to include Canada, the recent case of Frances Widdowson is relevant, as a firing of a tenured faculty member, involving complex conflict with the unit of employment. As far as I know, there may be ongoing litigation involving this case, so some details may not be publicly available, but much of her case can be perused online.
Chris Bertram 03.13.23 at 6:13 pm
In the UK there is no tenure and academics have similar protections to other employees with the caveat that there is legal protection for “academic freedom”. Bristol fired David Miller (no, not that one) in October 2021 for failing to “meet the standards of behaviour it expects from its staff”. After a long-standing dispute involving speech about Israel which was found not to be unlawful. I think the legal case still continues. I was disturbed both by Miller’s sacking and by the fact that Bristol had managed to appoint someone like him in the first place. He now makes appearances on Iran’s Press TV on which he and former MP Chris Williamson promote various “non-mainstream” theories about Iran, Syria, Ukraine etc, all from the perspective of seeing the nefarious “Zionists” at work. I’m pleased he is no longer at Bristol, though I don’t like the precedent one bit.
Alex SL 03.13.23 at 9:33 pm
Sashas,
Maybe that is the case in the USA, but the underlying question is what academic freedom should ideally mean. I find it extremely difficult to accept that it is meaningfully academic freedom if a tenured biology professor simply decided not to teach biology anymore (refusal to do the job) or to teach creationism (too unqualified to do the job).
The Florida argument has a familiar shape; it feels similar to libertarian takes on guns and cryptocurrency. The idea is that you need to have guns, or a way to move your money, in case an oppressive government comes for you. The problem is that if the government comes for your guns, they have rocket launchers, helicopters, and tanks. If they come for your money, they can imprison you and torture the information how to access it out of you. Similarly, if the state legislature comes for your academic freedom, it will take it away by passing a law, and that was that.
The only situation in which you can actually have guns/electronic Monopoly money/academic freedom is one in which the government is okay with you having them in the first place, so they are never any use against oppressive governments. The purpose of academic freedom is to have the assistance of a supportive state against a rogue, unfair employer.
Ogden Wernstrom 03.13.23 at 10:06 pm
Sashas @7 commented:
Florida might be a bad example, since I’m not actually sure whether they still have tenure….
I think this article has a good overview of the recent changes to Florida law: Changes in tenure coming with new Florida law
That article closes with mention of the new accreditation standards – that require the state universities to go to a different accreditation agency each go-round, and those agencies must also be approved by the Florida board of governors. The current accrediting agency had asked a couple of the universities to respond to news stories that give the appearance of undue political influence, and of conflicts of interest in appointments to the state board of governors and the boards of governors of some universities.
That article does not mention that the law specifically allows Florida to sue an accrediting agency if it has been harmed by that agency.
Harry 03.13.23 at 10:10 pm
I think Sashas is at Madison where, I agree, the university honors the use/mention distinction. Not so our school district which has behaved shockingly badly. One teacher was forced out for saying to (white, upper middle class) student that a racial slur (which the teacher mentioned) was one of the most disrespectful things you could say to someone. Another for recommending that a student see a documentary about James Baldwin. I doubt you’ll find these cases online but google “security guard MMSD racial slur” for something that seems like it was invented by a right wing nut. (It wasn’t. It happened).
Alan White 03.13.23 at 10:33 pm
Sashas @ 12
If it’s true that the use/mention distinction is alive and well, then why are there cases where professors are being called out on very clear instances where they did not use slurs, but only mentioned them? Note how this article begins:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-it-ever-ok-to-enunciate-a-slur-in-the-classroom
Matt 03.14.23 at 12:41 am
In Australia there is also no tenure as such. Academics are protected by the same general employment protections as others (under the Fair Work Act), sometimes via individual contractual provisions, though this isn’t super common, I think, and often via provisions in “Enterprise Agreements” (i.e., collective barganing agreements.) While I’m not certain, these protections seem to me to be less strong than tenure at at least many US universities, though much stronger than what non-tenured academics in the US, or most other employees in the US, have.
A few things that are relevant for Australia is that even if there is a good ground for dismissal, the dismissal is still supposed to be done in the “right” way, and so one can get compensation (or, rarely, reinstatement) if the dismissal was “harsh” or “unreasonable”. Also, there is a fairly strong tradition of accepting claims for “constructive dismissal” – i.e., if your employer makes your job such that your only reasonable option is to quit, you can be treated as if you were fired. And, there are protections against “adverse action” taken by an employer that are less than dismissal, though these have to be connected to particular protected reasons/grounds.
All this said, the most common remedy for an unfair dismissal is to be paid one’s notice period. This could be as short as 6 months, though it can be a good deal longer for people with a long employment history. (It’s often set out in the Enterprise Agreement.) And, if you take a new position in the meantime, this off-sets the amount you have to be paid. So, it’s protection, but not necessarily all that much protection. Without knowing the details of the case well, my [easily subject to revision] impression is that, in Australia, a prudential administrator would have placed Täuber on so-called “garden leave” (i.e., paid her, but either told her to not come in or otherwise removed all of her duties) for her notice period, on the grounds that the relationsip was unrepairable, with the hopes that she’d then find another position and no pay-out would be necessary after that time. While I’m not certain, I think that would be possible here.
Tm 03.14.23 at 8:52 am
“I find it extremely difficult to accept that it is meaningfully academic freedom if a tenured biology professor simply decided not to teach biology anymore (refusal to do the job) or to teach creationism (too unqualified to do the job).”
In my understanding, neither academic tenure nor general civil service protection prevent a person from being fired for misconduct (which includes doing the job poorly or not at all), only there is a relatively burdensome process for doing so. Whether your creationsim example counts as misconduct however is doubtful. If you can fire a professor for teaching creationism, what prevents you from firing a professor for teaching critical race theory, or Marxist economics? Of course the examples are not really comparable, but by what neutral criteria do you distinguish between minority views that are rightly rejected by the scientific consensus, and minority views that the government of Florida would like to suppress? The key is obviously to properly vet the candidates and hire qualified people with a sound track record. It’s rather unlikely that somebody with a strong research record in biology starts believing in creationism.
Tm 03.14.23 at 9:29 am
Further Alex 7: “I find it difficult to imagine how one could continue working amicably with one’s colleagues and managers after such a publication.”
I really want to push back against that. I don’t know the details of this particular case but I know that the following frequently happens:
1 An employee is victim of harassment or mobbing.
2 They complain internally.
3 Management and HR side with the harassers.
4 The mobbing gets worse.
5 The employee complains louder, maybe goes public or even files a lawsuit. (This happens rarely because most people in this situation give up and quit).
6 The employee is fired due to “disrupted employment relationship” (yes, this is a thing)
7 If the employee goes to court, they likely lose because enough of their former coworkers will testify that they were difficulut to work with.
This destructive cycle works so well because so many people are willing to blame the victim. A few years ago, a head physician (Natalie Urwyler, now famous) who was fired after a pregnancy leave won a discrimination case against the university hospital. The courts here very rarely rule for the plaintiff, this was near unprecedented.
A friend of mine worked at the time for the same institution, was a victim of mobbing by the same institution, became sick and later lost her job. She was absolutely convinced that the other woman’s firing was justified and that she was only after the money. Urwyler’s case is still not fully resolved because the institution prefers to continue fighting the victim rather than admitting wrongdoing and changing its ways. Surely this is only the tip of the iceberg.
https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/habe-noch-kein-geld-gesehen-inselspital-will-aerztin-trotz-gerichtsurteil-loswerden
Agnes 03.14.23 at 10:30 pm
Correction: you write “None of the colleagues are named, and while it’s pretty clear she is describing her (awful) experiences in the department no individual colleague can be identified plausibly.” However, in that article ST clearly refers to senior academics she is working with and dependent on. A simple web search at that time would easily reveal the name(s) of the person(s) she is referring to. Undoubtedly this must have felt as a personal, but public, accusation.
Also, I wonder whether it is not important to consider that, way before the publication of the essay, there was a conflict between her and the senior staff. Her own actions were the seed of the conflict, which was identified by the court (5.7): she officially accused her supervisor of discrimination against her after his perfectly reasonable advice about waiting a few more months with a promotion request (due to publications being in the pipeline). In the period after, when attempts were made to find a way to talk with her about this, she suddenly published her essay in a renommated journal in the field.
Of course, she should have the freedom of speech to do so, but it does not witness of a very positive attempt to repair a working relationship, to say the least. Perhaps this puts the things in a different day light? Does this not make it hard to disentangle the disturbed employer relationship and the freedom of speech issue? After all, people (not necessarily ST by the way) who unjustly feel that they are victimized may lash out to an organization and engage in false accusations and slander. Would that still qualify as academic freedom of speech?
Agnes vb 03.15.23 at 4:24 pm
Correction: you write “None of the colleagues are named, and while it’s pretty clear she is describing her (awful) experiences in the department no individual colleague can be identified plausibly.” However, in that article ST clearly refers to senior academics she is working with and dependent on. A simple web search at that time would easily reveal the name(s) of the person(s) she is referring to. Undoubtedly this must have felt as a personal, but public, accusation.
Also, I wonder whether it is not important to consider that, way before the publication of the essay, there was a conflict between her and the senior staff. Her own actions were the seed of the conflict, which was identified by the court (5.7): she officially accused her supervisor of discrimination against her after his perfectly reasonable advice about waiting a few more months with a promotion request (due to publications being in the pipeline). In the period after, when attempts were made to find a way to talk with her about this, she suddenly published her essay in a renommated journal in the field.
Of course, she should have the freedom of speech to do so, but it does not witness of a very positive attempt to repair a working relationship, to say the least. Perhaps this puts the things in a different day light? Does this not make it hard to disentangle the disturbed employer relationship and the freedom of speech issue? After all, people (not necessarily ST by the way) who unjustly feel that they are victimized may lash out to an organization and engage in false accusations and slander. Would that still qualify as academic freedom of speech?
Alex SL 03.16.23 at 7:59 am
Tm,
I was not saying that tenure should protect from being incompetent or unwilling to do one’s job, merely that I have seen people seriously argue that it should, and I disagree with that.
I am also not disagreeing with what you say at #21, although conversely, depending on the details of a case (which I have no direct insight into), there may also be actual cases of an employee disrupting the relationship.
What I was saying is that even if the employee is in the right, once they have published a piece like that, it is very hard to see how they could continue to work at the place. They have just publicly attacked its reputation and various colleagues who they would have to trust and who would have to trust them if they want to only just function in their role. How would that work? Even if they are fully in the right, a generous financial settlement would be a better option than keeping the job, I feel. Or firing everybody else except that one person, but that seems implausible.
Tm 03.16.23 at 4:13 pm
Alex 24: I know very little about the specific case of the OP (the Google results are mostly in Dutch, which I do not read). My point was a general one: it is very common that the very fact that a victim complained about of mobbing/harassment/discrimination is turned against the victim. And this cannot be accepted. This blame-the-victim culture needs to change, and if that makes some bosses and coworkers uncomfortable so be it.
And I’m well aware that the victim, if after fighting their employer they prevail and can keep their job, still suffers the consequences. I personally would encourage people in a hostile work environment to leave early if they possibly can, before sacrificing years of their lives to a fight that is so depressingly stacked against them. My greatest respect to those who still opt for fighting.
And yes, in some cases the alleged victim is wrong, the complaints are not justified or exaggerated, or the victim bears some of the blame. Each case needs to be judged individually, but we must take into account that the alleged victim is almost always in a structurally very weak position against a powerful, well-lawyered institution. In far too many cases, the harassers prevail and part of the reason is a cultural bias against the victims.
Alex SL 03.16.23 at 9:38 pm
Tm,
Again, I do not disagree with any of that. But what am I actually to do about the fact that “it is very common that the very fact that a victim complained about of mobbing/harassment/discrimination is turned against the victim” if, in the end, as you rightly wrote, “each case needs to be judged individually”? Certainly I cannot just assume that colleagues saying “she is a trouble-maker” proves that she is in the right and that the institution has a toxic culture. I would still have to search for evidence that the institution has a toxic culture.
An interesting question that I hadn’t responded to is
If you can fire a professor for teaching creationism, what prevents you from firing a professor for teaching critical race theory, or Marxist economics?
The simplistic answer is that, yes, if a theory or school of thought is nonsense, then people who espouse them should not be hired, and those who start teaching them after having snuck in should be told to get back into the zone of competence and state of knowledge.
The realistic answer is that, as you insinuate, what is and what isn’t nonsense isn’t always easy to figure out because for all of us non-experts (e.g., me relative to the field of economics) it is turtles all the way down, with some exceptions where we may be able to see somebody make a prediction that fails spectacularly while the opposing school of thought got it exactly right. That being said, it should be easy for a subject matter expert operating in good faith to make that call. That means that, in theory, one could leave it to the experts to judge what is valid in their field. Then this idea runs into the problem of all the flat earthers assuring us that their fellow flat earthers are well qualified and doing cutting-edge work.
A lot of people, at least of those that I read, seem to assume that the key problem is some fields being rather woolly. Like, civil engineering is a hard science (it is quite inarguable whether the bridge you designed collapses or does not collapse), but philosophy or theology are wishy-washy verbiage because they have no connection to measurable reality. I think that is actually incorrect. Virtually all areas of intellectual endeavor use either empirical evidence or logic (in the wider sense) or both, and even if a field is one of pure logic, that still means that one can decisively reject self-contradictions and unfounded statements.
The real problem underlying the muddle where a disproved idea nonetheless never goes away is when a field is influenced by material interests or biases such as wish-thinking. Civil engineering is just supposed to work, but economics is massively influenced by economic ideologies and financial interests, so there is a massive incentive to e.g. argue for deregulation and lower taxes because that is pleasing to powerful interests, be it a good idea for society as a whole or not. Mathematics isn’t stepping on many people’s toes, but history has the potential to offend national pride or provide justification for this or that political viewpoint. At the extreme end of the spectrum, I would consider ‘theos’ to have the exact same evidential backing and therefore justification to be the topic of university studies as fairies or phlogiston, but despite this, there is clearly still enormous public support for having theology as a university subject. If millions of people supported fairiology, at least universities would have fairiologist departments.
My answer would therefore be: in principle there is no problem, but in practice there is a problem given that most people do not make good faith, rational judgements. And therefore the better world is one in which some nonsense is tolerated, as the price for good fields being allowed to exist in the face of a dominant interest that would like to shut them down for ideological reasons.
Cora Diamond 03.17.23 at 3:54 pm
AlexSL thinks one can still decisively reject self-contradictions. Well, see Graham Priest and dialetheism. This is reputable stuff.
Alex SL 03.17.23 at 10:59 pm
Cora Diamond,
Maybe I am missing the subtleties of fields that are not my expertise, but I am am thinking of propositions that are easily recognised as nonsense, such as incoherent economic theories or the trinity. Surely you are not suggesting that if somebody argues in subsequent sentences of the same book (1) that birds are so divergent from dinosaurs that the latter should be accepted as a paraphyletic taxon and (2) that the transition from dinosaurs to birds was very slow and gradual, that I have to accept that as reputable because of the intricacies of the deeper study of formal logic? No, I can well conclude that this colleague is just making it up as he goes along, grasping for any rationalisation to promote paraphyletic taxa without caring for intellectual consistency. The second statement, which is correct, directly proves that the first is a falsehood, and that is that.
JPL 03.20.23 at 12:57 am
The exchange between Alex SL and Cora Diamond has been bothering me for the last few days, because it raises interesting questions, not really about academics in the Netherlands, but about language, and since the philosophers are not saying anything, and the thread seems moribund anyway, I might not be derailing it in making this comment. Philosophers, please correct me where I am wrong here.
The problem here is that Alex SL used the term “self-contradiction”, and that expression is ambiguous. What Alex SL needs (although he didn’t express it that way) is a case where “contradiction” refers to the act of language use called “making an argument”, where an arguer is making assertions, and the “self” is the person doing the arguing. “Self-contradiction” implies that the relation described has the property of reflexivity, where the reflexive relation has a source-goal ordering, and where the objects described by the two terms (call them “agent” and “affected”) are identical (Sam in each case). So, the expression “Sam contradicted himself” is parallel to “Sam cut himself”. Maybe Sam asserts two claims, a1 and a2, where if a1 is true, then a2 is false, and if a2 is true, then a1 is false; they can’t both be asserted and accepted as true at the same time, and the propositions expressed are said to be contradictory. (The two assertions do not have to involve negation, but that is a typical case.)
What dialetheia requires is (or, I should say, what it ought to be seen as requiring) is a case where it is the relation of reference that has the property of reflexivity, with the referring expression and the referent in the source-goal roles, and with the terms (of the critique) “referring expression” and “referent” having the property of referential identity. The only case where you can have this is when you have a single sentence in both source and goal roles, and you get dialetheia when you have a sentence judging the truth value of that same sentence, as in the Liar Paradox. Now Frege allowed for whole sentences, not just parts of sentences, to participate in the reference relation, but in the case of sentences he said that the referent was a truth value (as opposed to some particular intentional object in the world being described). So, in the case of the Liar sentence, the truth-value (of the sentence) would be both the true and the false, i.e., that the Liar sentence would have both truth values at once. There is indeed a paradox here, but no contradiction, I would say. I think I can show this, but it would take many pages to make the idea understandable. The account above is not quite correct, in that, for Frege, it is not sentences that participate in the reference relation and have truth values, but propositions (or “thoughts”), so we have to make the distinction between sentences and propositions, as a start.
tm 03.20.23 at 10:22 am
Alex: “what am I actually to do about the fact that “it is very common that the very fact that a victim complained about of mobbing/harassment/discrimination is turned against the victim””
Well you don’t have to do anything about it unless you are in some way involved (e. g. as a coworker, administrator, judge, journalist, or even law-maker). If you are involved, however, or if you involve yourself for some reason, I think you have a special responsibility toward the alleged victim. That doesn’t mean you always have to side with the victim or give their word more credibility than the other side. But you have the responsibility to take into account the systemic asymmetry of the situation and the dynamics of victim-blaming. While it remains true that each case needs to be judged individually, one also I think needs to consider the systemic dimension. For example if the victim gets a financial settlement and leaves, without the institution admitting fault and committing to changing its culture, the problem will almost certainly persist and others will suffer similarly.
Alex SL 03.20.23 at 9:21 pm
tm,
I agree, of course. Another consideration is the starting point, where the oft-misunderstood “believe the victim” is helpful, i.e., start the investigation under the assumption that the a complaint means that there was likely an offense, as opposed to under the assumption that complaints are likely fraudulent.
But in terms of systemic dimensions, even a judge is unlikely to have much control over whether the institution reforms or not.
tm 03.21.23 at 7:59 am
The judge’s power depends on the law obviously. Here in Switzerland, the maximum sanction for abusive dismissal is all of 6 months of pay, which is quite a scandal in itself. So the main risk for an abusive employer is effectively reputational damage, which is not to underestimate, and here public attitudes play an important role.
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